Sharing of information within an organization, such as a corporation, is important to remain competitive in the global economy. The problem of efficient and timely information sharing increases as a corporation grows in size as workers become increasingly specialized and as geographical separation within an organization increases. Valuable information can include project updates and deadlines, answers to frequently asked questions, and competitive intelligence.
Currently, email is the primary manner for knowledge sharing by workers as email is their primary work environment. Although email was designed for asynchronous communication, knowledge workers utilize email for many purposes beyond this original intended use. Workers use email for sharing files, managing tasks, updates, notifications, and many other purposes. Unfortunately, this repurposing of email can lead to email overload. Additionally, content duplication with unmanaged or outdated version of documents often occurs. Moreover, useful knowledge can remain siloed in individual email inboxes, which function as personal information repositories, making reuse and sharing of the information difficult across organizations. Email is not an optimal tool for building and maintaining a group knowledge base.
Wikis have been deployed in corporate environments to encourage employees to share knowledge at a centralized location. Wikis allow for developing and organizing valuable knowledge through collaborative authoring tools. Despite their wide deployment, wikis have been slow to be adopted by workers due to high interaction costs in time involved in contributing to, and organizing, wiki content. The low adoption rate prevents wikis from reaching a critical mass needed to become a valuable tool for knowledge sharing. Typically, to add content to a wiki, a worker has to undertake a multi-step process including retrieving the correct uniform resource locator from multiple potential relevant wikis, remembering any necessary login information, opening the correct wiki editor in a Web browser, switching to the source of the content to be added, such as an email client, copying the content, switching back to the wiki editor, finding the appropriate portion of the wiki to add the content, and pasting the copied content to the section. The greater number of interaction steps, information channels to manage, and context switches required from workers is one of the main reasons that most knowledge sharing continues to occur via email.
Some conventional tools support collaborative activities around email. For example, Xobni, licensed by Xobni Corporation, provides enhanced search and people-based navigation of email archives. Information about email contacts is pulled from outside sources, such as social networks, and displayed to the users. However, the information is only pulled into the email client and no accommodations are made to transfer information from the email client to the outside sources, leaving the information siloed within the email client.
Other tools connect email to web repositories. For example, Topika, available at http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/disciplines/user/interns/2010/#topika, is a prototype Web-based tool that provides a shared inbox. Email messages are archived and organized into threads. New threads can be generated by sending emails from a regular email client to the tool's email address. However, information cannot directly be transferred to the tool within the regular email client context. Further, the emailed information added to the tool is unstructured. Similarly, Intraspect, available at http://tomgruber.org/technology/intraspect.htm, provides for user contribution to a shared workspace. Information can be added by emailing the workspace. However, the information is unstructured and the user is not provided with an interactive overview of the existing content of the workspace to aid in placement and organization of information.
Accordingly, there is a need for integrating shared information repositories within the context of traditional personal information tools while allowing for early curation and organization of information through targeted sharing.